


Castle, Kingside

by anonbach



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Magical Realism, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 21:06:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonbach/pseuds/anonbach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft plays chess with Death for Sherlock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Castle, Kingside

Mycroft's feet drag along the road and dust claws at his skin as he comes to a city gate, crumbling and eroded by the wind and sand of the surrounding desert. Contrary to the expectations impressed upon him by his father's history books, it is not heavily guarded even though he can hear the sounds of a lively market on the other side of the wall. The two guards posted on either side of the gate stand with their pikes at the ready, staring stonily into the distance. They allow Mycroft to pass without word, sign, or confrontation.

Each brick dwarfs him, and the neatly lain cobblestones disintegrate under his bare feet as he passes through the gate to the other side of the wall and into an empty plaza. 

Rocks and shards of pottery cut through his calluses. Rotting stands made from wood and canvas bow to the earth. 

He hears ghostly street performers singing and vendors hawking their wares as customers haggle for the best price above the squawking of chickens, and the scent of ginger and cinnamon wafts through the oppressive air. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches a glimpse of children kicking a ball of rags through the legs of passers-by. They disappear when he goes to join them, echoes of their laughter pealing through the street. 

The wind lifts sand into a whirlwind and the sky darkens with the threat of a storm. Blinding dust and stifling heat squeeze the breath out of Mycroft’s lungs, clogging his throat and nose as the simoom surrounds him.

When he finds himself again, he is standing at the edge of an oasis sheltered by date palms and sand dunes coloured burnt orange by the late evening sun.

He kneels down to drink the transparent water and breathes a sigh of relief as his fingers break the surface. Not a mirage, then. He’s read stories of men driven to insanity by the promise of water.

As he takes a draught, he catches a movement out of the corner of his eye.

In one fluid motion, Mycroft stands and faces the figure emerging from the shadows. For a moment, it is vaguely human, slow thighs slouching toward him. Clumsily, Mycroft shifts into a fighting position, but then relaxes when the figure temporarily resolves into a distinctly canine form. Its bushy tail wags tentatively as it sits in the brush beside him and drinks. After a while, it jumps into the water and swims to the other shore.

Shaking out its fur, the jackal turns to him and smiles. 

‘ _Come and see_ ,’ it says with the voice of thunder. 

The command is as irresistible as the oasis, and so Mycroft wades out until he is chest-deep in burning flowers. The sun turns into the moon and the water turns into blood as scorching tendrils pull him down. A current tugs at his clothing, ripping his shirt and trousers to threads. Strips of skin and muscle peel away from his bones. Droplets of his own fat float around him, forming ivory coins as they cool and coalesce. Attracted by the scent of iron, tiny fish nibble at his joints, shredding the remains of his tendons. Smoke and the stench of burning flesh rise from the boiling water. 

His skeleton crumbles to ash and sinks to the bottom of the pool (river, something tells him). A light, as clear and hot as a sun, radiates from his still beating heart. The crimson water reflects and refracts it into a million dancing specks that mock him. 

Everything stops.

He blinks, and realises that he is breathing. Moving. 

The clear, cold water laps gently at his knees and the soft mud oozes pleasantly over his toes. A few metres away, the jackal stands smiling, waiting, pink tongue lolling out of its mouth as it speaks again: ‘Come and see.’

The jackal leads him through the brush, pausing beside the entrance to its den before disappearing into the hole. Mycroft follows, crawling though the dirt on his stomach, clothes snagging on protruding rocks. 

Dirt and loose pebbles give way to the smooth stone of a cavern that opens to reveal the night sky, Orion hanging directly overhead. Flickering torches illuminate images of running bison and horses.

Mycroft sees something irresistible in the ebb and flow of the light: the imprint of a human hand. It is ancient: as old as—if not older than—the animal motif.  
He reaches out to touch it, gently placing his palm in the too-large outline. Stale air thrums with anticipation and the beginnings of a realisation dance on his tongue. 

A low whine comes from somewhere in the cave. ‘ _Welcome home._ ’

He is in the library, sitting across from his mother. Piles of books and a stuffed baboon have been pushed aside to make room for the wooden chess board that sits on the table between them, pieces arranged by rank and colour.

The far-off wails of an infant ring across the gardens and through the open window. Some small instinct nestled deep inside Mycroft’s chest tells him to find the source of the cries. He shifts in his seat, waiting for a signal from his mother to calm the child, but she merely smiles, revealing small white fangs.  
Torchlight flickers, and a jackal-headed woman is silhouetted against limestone walls. 

She demonstrates how the pieces move, beginning with the pawns, and shows him one of the simplest and most easily defensible of opening gambits (as he would later learn: The King’s Indian Defence. Ng8-f6, e7-e5, Bf8-a3, 0-0—he always has preferred playing as black). 

With each new game, his mother introduces him to new strategies. It engrosses Mycroft and frees his mind from concern about the crying baby. By dinner time, he has won once.

Mummy lets him win. 

Later, as he drifts off to sleep, he still hears her voice: ‘The queen belongs to herself, though her purpose is to protect the king.’

*

From the day Sherlock is brought home from the hospital—eyes still closed and dark hair plastered against his fragile skull—until the day he dies, Mycroft raises him. 

Their mother and father provide for them both, but the age-old adage that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ proves itself wrong.  
It takes a child to raise a child. 

The seven years between them are more than enough for invaluable lessons to be taught.

Speaking (age two), reading (age four), writing (age four). 

They have lazy August afternoons spent sitting in the shade of an oak tree reading _The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh_ and _Le Petit Prince_. For a while, they dream of a wise fox (jackal), an owl, and a small asteroid that has almost begun to feel like home. Reality is nothing, the mind is everything. 

Mycroft teaches Sherlock how to see.

This is how it is:

Catching frogs on the banks of the River Ouse and running along the battlements of Lewes Castle without getting caught. 

The smell of petrichor and the sickly sweetness of wildflowers floating on the breeze as they steal honey from their neighbour, Dr Bell, at Sherlock’s behest.  
‘It’s not stealing,’ he says as he hands thick leather gloves to Mycroft. ‘It’s a game.’  
Mycroft smiles at his younger brother. They know more about games than anyone else. 

The good doctor repays them by inviting them for tea.  
Springtime is spent instructing them in his philosophy: emphasising the importance of observation when making a diagnosis and how to curse the earth and sky and all the gods without caring. He teaches Mycroft of the quadrivium and the trivium, the ancient liberal arts: 

"Grammar is concerned with the thing as-it-is-symbolized,  
Logic is concerned with the thing as-it-is-known,  
Rhetoric is concerned with the thing as-it-is-communicated;  
Arithmetic is pure number;  
Geometry is number in space,  
Music is number in time, and  
Astronomy is number in time and space."

Mycroft grows bored, but will never forget. 

The warm afternoons of spring and summer turn into mid-winter chemistry and biology experiments and Winnie-the-Pooh is replaced with Christie and Solzhenitsyn.

One term break home from university, Mycroft steals a bottle of brandy from the liquor cabinet and shows Sherlock how to drink (thirteen, nineteen). Over summer holidays, they hide in an abandoned wooden shed in a farmer’s field and smoke cigarettes, and Mycroft gives Sherlock pointers on how to get the smell out of his clothes (thirteen, twenty).

They share a life, but chess is Mycroft’s.

*

At night, Mycroft dreams of the cave.

Bison and horses transform into creatures with a lion’s body and a man’s head, hunter-gatherers become farmers, the first crops of emmer are baked into bread, and the hunt turns into discourse. Humans become human. 

He is present when the first alphabets are etched in hardening clay, no more than simple lines. When a teacher tells his class about the forgotten scripts of the world, it is all he can do to stifle his laughter because he remembers. The words are foreign to him but the letters are native to his eyes. Civilisations rise, fall, and mend. Cornerstones crumble into dust and are rebuilt. 

Images dance in the flickering torchlight, paint runs across stone and voices echo with the dripping of the water. Be witness.

He dreams and it was. 

Everything changes and eventually fails, but the one constant is the ochre hand-print, which buzzes with an unfathomable electricity (wrongness). Something about it feels welcoming—and yet some inkling of self-preservation which Sherlock will never have tells Mycroft not to reach out and touch it. 

Mornings bring the sun and birdsong, and as he pulls himself back to consciousness and forgets the tragedy of thirty thousand years of history (but remembers the beauty; there’s always something), he cannot shake the unsettled feeling that sits in the bottom of his stomach.

*

At the age of twelve, he begs his mother for a set of pastels, and draws what little of it he recalls—mere distortions of space scribbled upon paper, which turn into buildings in his imagination.  
‘You could be an architect,’ someone says to him. 

Creator of things. 

*

Over time, he learns to ignore the painting of the hand completely and sees the development of Gregorian chant into opera, or watches helplessly as children are taken away from their homes, screaming for their mothers. Once, he crushes Wat Tyler’s rebellion, and eight hundred years later, he joins a revolution and sings at the top of his lungs, ‘El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!’.

He dreams until the night of his twenty-first birthday. 

*

The day that their father died was the last time that he dreamt of the cave, which, true to the jackal’s words, has become inexorably home. During that time, the anxiety that always accompanies waking up has become a constant, and coming home from university for summer holidays to find the house and Sherlock in a state of partial neglect merely exacerbates it until it is an almost physical sickness. 

He has long since given up on doing anything that could be construed as productive, and so he locks himself in the library with a stolen bottle of pinot gregio and a box of biscuits, praying that Sherlock wouldn’t find him and try to show him his latest experiment. The time for that is long past. 

His low tolerance for alcohol betrays him and he’s well past drunk when he stumbles up the stairs and flops onto his bed, still fully clothed. Still dreading what tomorrow may bring, he doesn’t fall asleep but lies there, watching the ceiling churn. It darkens into the midnight sky and he is _home._  
Impressionism has reverted back to Baroque art, and water has gathered into a lily-covered pool in the middle of the cave, but for once he ignores those and focuses on the details until he sees it. 

The nameless fear that has dogged him settles as he inspects the walls for the first time in years. It could have been forever, for all he knows. 

Tiny letters are interspersed through remnants of pigment. Mycroft leans closer, seeing patterns that draw the eye toward the focal point. He traces his finger along a line of delicate writing, moon coconut flowing through to the lover’s spine, until it meets the point of convergence. If anything, the hand-print has grown clearer. 

His palm rests perfectly inside the ochre one. As the stone warms with his body-heat, the metallic scent of blood fills the air and one pulse becomes two. Rust-coloured fingers peel away from the stone, curling around his. They tug at his wrist, and the wall groans and cracks as his his arm is pulled deep into the rock.

For a moment, he sees the jackal from his childhood standing next to him, teeth bared in an ugly snarl.  
But then he steps through the crack in the wall, and he is falling through space, seeing all that ever has been and all that will be.

He says, _Let there be light_ , and there is light. 

The realisation that he never voiced when he was seven years old and first walked into the cave, is fulfilled.  
He stands at the centre of the human race: its will to say _I am._

‘Life.’

When he wakes up in the morning, sprawled on his bed with a half-empty wine bottle on his nightstand, he smiles to himself and forgets the unimportant. 

Life goes on.

**Author's Note:**

> One day I may come back to this, but for now, and quite possibly for eternity, I am leaving it as is. Fill for [ this prompt ](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/19351.html?thread=115259543#t115259543) at the kinkmeme.


End file.
